This Week’s Top Audience Stories: The Problem of Figuring Out Popularity

This Week’s Insights: It’s getting much more difficult to measure popularity… A Wikipedia for Gen Z’s… How TV shapes how we think… What happens when you decide to give away all your tickets?… Emojis are now the preferred way of expressing emotion (over phone calls).

What’s The Measure of Popularity? Perhaps the better way of framing it is what’s the measure of success? There are now so many ways that music is monitized – through streams, merch, downloads and yes, still physical copies – that how do you measure which music is most popular at any point in time. We used to be able to rely on the Billboard charts, but there are now so many channels and genres, and the music business has become so global, that it’s almost impossible to measure. One question: does it matter in the age of algorithmically-shaped taste?

A Wikipedia for Gen Z’s: A site called “Famous Birthdays” began as a way to keep track of and find basic info about stars of YouTube and other social media sites. It took off. It now has 20 million visitors a month – more than popular entertainment magazines – and has become the go-to source for reference info for this generation.

The Influence Of TV On Our Brains: Ever since TV became a phenomenon, researchers have been trying to find out what the effects of watching TV are. A new study suggests that our ideas and opinions are shaped by how much we watch, what we watch, and that the harm seems to come not so much from the content itself but from the fact that it replaces more enlightening ways of spending time. TV then, really does help shape how you think.

The “Radical Hospitality” Of Giving Away Your Tickets: Seattle’s Intiman Theatre is doing it. “The initiative, artistic director Jen Zeyl explained, is about more than the standard theater problem of getting ‘butts in seats.’ (Though, of course, there’s that.) It’s about getting the butts one wants in seats — not just the people who can afford to take the $25+ crap shoot known as a theater ticket, but the people who can’t: the woman at the corner store, high-school sophomore, the guy asking for spare change on the sidewalk.” Question: how big a factor, actually, is ticket price in whether people attend or not?

Emojis Are Now Replacing The Phone Call: A survey found that “the majority of respondents (65%) said they are more comfortable expressing their emotions through emojis than a phone call. That number rises to 83% among Gen Z users, who represent the largest segment of media audience, according to the 2017 Nielsen Total Audience Report. What does this mean for the ways people prefer to interact with one another?

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WALLACE FOUNDATION AUDIENCE RESOURCES

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WORLD MUSIC/CRASHarts Tests New Format New Name to Draw New AudiencesThis article and video are part of a series describing the early work of some of the 25 performing arts organizations participating in The Wallace Foundation’s $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative. Launched in 2015 in response to concerns about a declining audience base for a number of major art forms, the endeavor seeks to help the organizations strengthen their audience-building efforts, see if this contributes to their financial sustainability, and develop insights from the work for the wider arts field.

Denver Center Theatre Company is Cracking the Millennial Code...One Step at a TimeThe average single-ticket buyer at the Denver Center Theatre Company is 50 years old and the average subscriber is 63, despite the fact that millennials, a group often defined as people born between 1981 and 1997, compose the largest age group in Denver. Since 2010, the Denver Center has been engaged in an iterative process of experimentation, evaluation and refinement to help reverse this trend.

“Encouraging people to attend the ballet more often was less about increasing their familiarity with productions and more about bridging an uncertainty gap. “Familiarity is about information,” notes Martin, “whereas uncertainty about how an experience will feel is much more personal. You can give somebody a lot of information but that’s not necessarily going to reassure them that they’re going to belong in that audience.”